Microsoft Search Server 2008 - Installation and Administration - HOL218

8/9/2019 Microsoft Search Server 2008 - Installation and Administration - HOL218

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Hands-on Lab Overview

1. Introduction

HOL218: Microsoft Search Server 2008 - Installation and Administration

2. Technologies Highlighted

Microsoft Search Server 2008

3. Audience

ITPro 200 level

4. Scenario

Learn about the installation and administration options available in Microsoft Search Server 2008, such as the SearchAdministration Bar, Content Sources, Crawl Rules, Scopes, Authoritative Pages, Keywords and Best Bets, and Reporting.

5. Purpose of Hands-on Lab

Learn about the installation and administration options available in Microsoft Search Server 2008, such as the SearchAdministration Bar, Content Sources, Crawl Rules, Scopes, Authoritative Pages, Keywords and Best Bets, and Reporting.

The Microsoft Search Server 2008 installation is quite similar to the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 installation.The main differences are a options that are not available in Central Administration and the Shared Service provider, andthat the Site Collection creation and configuration options differ.

For more information on using and configuring Microsoft Office Server 2008, see the Getting Started with Microsoft SearchServer 2008 and Microsoft Search Server 2008 - Creating a Federated Search Connector labs.

6. Pre-Lab Setup

In order to save time some of the installation steps have been pre-completed for this lab. The complete installation cantake up to 2 hours. The steps taken are detailed below to give you an idea of what is required to install Microsoft SearchServer 2008.

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Reference Step 1 Getting Started with MicrosoftSearch Server 2008 Installation

These steps are for your reference only - Lab exercises begin on page 11.

Begin installing Microsoft Search Server 2008 Login using the following credentials:o Username: administrator o Password: pass@word1o Log on to: LITWAREINC

Double-click the SearchServerExpress.exe file.

This will extract the files needed to install Search Server, and display the Start page. From here, youwill be guided through the steps needed to install Search Server Express.

Search Server 2008 introduces the Server Preparation Tool, which allows you to install all prerequisitecomponents before launching the actual Search Server setup process, preventing potentiallynumerous false starts. For your next step, click the Run the Search Server Preparation Tool link.When the wizard appears, click Next to begin the preparation.

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Once the Preparation Tool completes, click the Finish button and you will be returned to the Startpage. Click the Install Search Server link.

Wait for the Microsoft Software License Terms screen to appear. Check the I accept the terms of this agreement checkbox, and click on the Continue button.

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Click the Basic button to continue.

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When the installation completes, click on the Close button to proceed to the SharePoint Products andTechnologies Configuration Wizard.

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Reference Step 2 Using the SharePoint Productsand Technologies Configuration Wizard

This exercise will take you through the initialconfiguration of Microsoft Search Server 2008 farm.

These steps are for your reference only - Lab exercises begin on page 11.

Run the configuration wizard.

In Microsoft Search Server 2008, the Central

Administration site is a SharePoint site collection. This

The Welcome screen will appear; click Next to continue. An information dialog box will appear explaining the services that will be affected by the configuration

wizard. Click Yes to continue.

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means that a number of tasks must occur before anadministrator can visit the Central Administration site.The SharePoint Products and TechnologiesConfiguration Wizard leads you through the stepsrequired to initially configure your Microsoft SearchServer 2008 installation.

The Configuring SharePoint Products and Technologies page will appear and step through 10 tasksusing the information supplied. Some steps will take several minutes each, please be patient.

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The Configuration Successful page will appear. Click Finish to launch the Central Administrationpages.

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The Welcome to Microsoft Search Server 2008 page is loaded.

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End of reference steps begin your lab on the next page.

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Hands-on Lab

Discussion Points Actions taken

Exercise 1 Administration Experience

Administering Search Server 2008 is much easier and more intuitivethan any previous Microsoft search system. A new SearchAdministration dashboard places all relevant administrative functions,system status, help topics, and shortcut links at the tip of your mousepointer.

Login using the following credentials:o Username: administrator o Password: pass@word1o Log on to: LITWAREINC

Click Start ->All Programs -> Microsoft Search Server -> Search Server 2008 Administration

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A big key to ease of use is the new Administration Bar. Click on some of the options and note that it remains visible on all pages of the SearchServer administration console. This keeps your primary options availableat all times as you manage your Search Server.

Click across several of the Crawling , Queries and Results , or Usage Reportsoptions and observe that the Administration Bar remains visible. You may alwaysreturn to the dashboard by clicking the Search Administration link at the top of the bar.

The one exception is the link to access SharePoints Central Administration.Click the Central Administration link. You will be placed on the normalSharePoint Central Administration screen.

Return to the Search Administration dashboard by clicking SharedServices1 onthe Quick Launch. Notice that Search Administration has been made the default

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page in this Shared Services Provider.

In order for Search Server to crawl content or federate results fromsources outside of your firewall, you may need to make it aware of your corporate proxy server.

Click the Proxy and timeouts link in the Administration Bar.

Simply enter the appropriate information just as you would for Internet explorer.Note that from this screen you can also specify timeouts, and whether to ignoresecure (HTTPS) sites which have expired or otherwise invalid SSL certificates.

Click Cancel. A proxy is not required in this lab environment.

Content Sources, Crawl Rules and Federated Locations are threedistinct ways to define where Search Server finds information to presentto your users.

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Content Sources allow you to define locations for SearchServer to crawl and build into its index. All content sources areavailable for consideration as part of a querys scope andweighted appropriately when part of a result set.

Crawl Rules permit you to define subsets of your contentsources to explicitly include or exclude during the crawl andindexing process.

Federated Locations are systems which have their own URL-based search functionality. You can instruct Search Server passyour users queries to the other system, and present its resultsalong side of any results from Search Servers own index and/or other federated locations. These results are not considered aspart of Search Servers weightings, and each Federated resultset is presented in a separate web part on the search resultspage.

Content sources are created by administrators based on the companysneeds and are used to determine what content locations are to becrawled and subsequently indexed. The Content Sources are accessedwhen a crawl is performed.

The Manage Content Sources screen lists all current content sources.The status columns show whether the content source is currently beingused to perform a crawl, how long that crawl has been running, and howlong the previous crawl took. The next full crawl and next incrementalcrawl columns provide a quick view of the schedules for your contentsources.

Click Content sources .

New content sources can be added by using the Add Content Sourcepage. On this page, the administrator can enter a name for the new

content source. There are a number of choices for the type of contentsource. It can be other SharePoint sites, Web sites, file shares, or Exchange public folders. After the content source type is chosen, theadministrator can specify the URL of where the content is located andoptionally set the crawl schedule. Selecting the Start full crawl of thiscontent source check box at the bottom of the page and clicking OKstarts a full crawl of the new content source.

Click the New Content Source button. Type contosofinancial.com in the Name box

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Click Web Sites Type http://www.contosofinancial.com in the Start Addresses box. Check the Start Full Crawl of this content source checkbox

Click OK Repeat the steps to create another content source, substituting Contoso Files

for the name, File Shares for the type, and \\localhost\Contosofiles for the startaddress.

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Click OK .

Wait for the crawl to complete. You can check on the status of the crawl by

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clicking on the Refresh button. Click Search Administration to return to the dashboard. Note that the status

has updated to show your new content sources and the documents containedtherein.

Crawl rules, which apply to all content sources, are created to improvethe efficiency of the crawling and indexing process by ensuring that onlyvalid content is considered. The SharePoint Central Administration UIallows administrators to specify what files/folders should beincluded/excluded when a crawl is performed. This can also improveperformance and search result relevancy.

Click Crawl rules . Click New Crawl Rule. Click Include all items in this path . Observe that in an Include crawl rule, you

can specify authentication other than the default content access accountcredentials. If you select a non-default authentication choice, you will bepresented with options appropriate to that selection.

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The first screen lists any existing crawl rules that are available for editing. An administrator can add a new crawl rule as well. In this form,the administrator specifies the path that will be included or excludedfrom the crawl.

Click Cancel . We wont actually create a rule at this time. Click Search Administration.

The Search Administration dashboard provides easy access to the crawl

logs. Here you can analyze what was crawled successfully andunsuccessfully for each content source.

Click Crawl log . Notice that the values for the status are clickable, allowing you

to drill down to see the status of the individual items.

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Search Server 2008 is capable of crawling and indexing sites external toyour network; however, many sites already contain an effective searchfunction. Often you will be able to configure Search Server to simplypass users query parameters to that remote engine, and present theresults alongside those directly indexed. This is called Federatedsearch.

See Microsoft Search Server 2008 - Creating a Federated SearchConnector for more information on creating and using FederatedSearch Connectors.

Click Federated Locations .

Notice the out of the box entries for Local Search Results and Live.com, as wellas a Live.com (Simulated) offline source created for this lab.

Click the New Location button.

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By default, queries in Search Server are processed against the entireindex. Search Scopes allow administrators to create rules to designatesubsets of the index to be used for certain queries. For example, youmight wish to limit a query to a particular content source, or even a folder within a content source. By judiciously defining scopes and scope rulesyou can increase query efficiency and result relevance. Scopes may becreated at the site collection or SSP level, though most are specific to agiven Search Center site collection.

Click Search Administration . Under Shortcuts , click Scopes for this Search Center . Notice that this link

takes you to out of Search Administration and to your Search Centers SiteSettings.

Click New Scope . Enter AdventureWorks in the title field, and select both the Search Dropdown

and Advanced Search checkboxes.

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Select the AdventureWorks Documents content source from the dropdown. Select the Require option button. Click the OK button. From the Browser History drop-down, return to the Search Administration

page.

Search Server provides a mechanism for you to easily boost or reducethe relevancy of certain content Authoritative Pages. By specifyingauthoritative pages, you can tell Search Server to assume that thesepages (and pages linked more directly from them) are more likely thanothers in your document corpus to be valid and relevant to your users.

In the Specify Authoritative Pages page, there are four levels of granularity for authoritative sites. The first three levels are MostAuthoritative pages, then Second-level Authoritative, and Third-levelAuthoritative pages. Finally, the administrator can also specify whichsites should be demoted by adding these sites to the Non-Authoritativesection of the page.

Click Authoritative pages . Note the three levels of positive, and one level of negative, authority available.

Click Cancel .

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Sometimes you may wish certain results to always be emphasized whenparticular query terms are entered. Search Server 2008 supportsassociating Best Bets pages and other information with Keywords.When matches are found to these conditions, they are called out in aseparate area of your results page.

An additional benefit of Keywords and Best Bets is that they do not needto refer to pages contained within your index. This allows you to specifyresults outside of your network, or simply provide critical information onthe spot.

On the Search Administration home page, under Shortcuts , click Keywordsfor this Search Center . Again notice that these are defined per Search Center in Site Settings, not for the entire server.

Click Add Keyword .

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Note the options available. Click Cancel . From the Browser History drop-down, return to the Search Administration

page.

Exercise 2 Reporting on Search Usage

Search Server provides key reports to help you understand what your users are looking for, what they are finding, and (perhaps moreimportant) what they are not finding.

Query reports provide an easy way for administrators and managers tosee what is being searched upon and how results are being returned.These reports show how accurate the results have been and provideclues about how the administrator can improve these results.

Each view can be exported directly to Microsoft Excel or as a PDF file.

Click Queries report . The first two query views show the number of queriesover a certain amount of time, either 30 days or 12 months. By default, the datais displayed as a bar chart, but it can also be viewed as a list.

The Search Queries Report page appears. The first two query views show the number of queries over a certain amount of

time, either 30 days or 12 months. By default, the data is displayed as a bar chart, but it can also be viewed as a list. Notice the Queries Over Previous 30

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Note : Since this is a new server and no searches have been performed,some of these reports may be blank or the screenshot examples maydiffer slightly.

Days and Queries Over Previous 12 Months charts. Click the forward arrow above the Queries Over Previous 12 Months chart.

Scroll down to the next two charts in the browser window. The third view shows the origin of queries across the server farm for the last 30

days as a pie chart. In a multi-server enterprise environment, this view wouldshow the breakdown of searches with results for each site collection. Thisprovides a quick measurement of usage.

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The fourth view shows the queries per scope over the last 30 days. This view isalso displayed as a pie chart. Scope usage can help determine the relevancy of scopes that have been created.

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Scroll down until the last table is displayed in the browser window. The last viewdisplayed in the queries report is the Top Queries over the Previous 30 Daystable. This table lists the query string, scope, and number of occurrences of themost frequently used search terms.

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The Search Results report provides administrators with five differentviews that represent the successes and failures of user search queries.All data is displayed from the last 30 days, but as with query reports, allthe data can be exported to Excel or a PDF file for archiving or further analysis.

The first view lists the most-visited pages that are returned from asearch query and the number of times each was visited.

The second view shows queries that did not return any search results,and also identifies the scope from which they were performed and thenumber of times the query occurred. This view can be helpful indetermining the success of custom search keywords. When a particular search query has a high occurrence rate, administrators can add the fullquery and the individual words in the query as keywords that bind to aspecific document, share, or site collection.

By identifying high-occurrence spelling errors, administrators can createcustom corrections to commonly misspelled words that the defaultsearch system might not capture.

The third and fourth views provide query analysis on Best Bets. BestBets are administrator-configured results that are connected to particular keywords or keyword phrases. These views provide analysis of thesuccess of the Best Bets assigned to user searches.

The fifth view shows the click-through rates of queries and sorts themaccording to scope, occurrence, and percentage. When cross-compared

Click Results report . Note : Since this is a new server and no searches have been performed, some of

these reports may be blank or the screenshot examples may differ slightly. View Queries With Zero Results .

View Queries With Zero Best Bets .

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with the top queries listing (which is viewed in the query report), anadministrator can quickly identify whether or not high-volume queries areproperly connected to the right documents or sources.

Earlier you learned that the Scopes and Keyword/Best Bet settings werehoused in the Search Centers Site Settings. By default, Search Server 2008 Express installs a Search Center (a site configured to enter queries and display results). The Site Collection Administration sectioncontains many links that allow the administrator to manage the currentSearch Center.

Click Search Administration. Click Search Center Site in the Shortcuts section at the upper-right corner of the

dashboard.

From the Search Center, click Site Actions | Site Settings .

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Under Site Collection Administration column, notice several search-relatedoptions:

o Search settings Allows you to designate a specific results pageo Search scopes As described aboveo Search keywords Keywords and Best Bets as described aboveo Search queries The Search Queries report described above, scoped to

the current site collection rather than the entire Search Server o Search results The Search Results report described above, scoped to

the current site collection rather than the entire Search Server

Conclusion

I. Conclusion

In this lab, you learned about the installation and administration options available in Microsoft Search Server 2008, such as the SearchAdministration Bar, Content Sources, Crawl Rules, Scopes, Authoritative Pages, Keywords and Best Bets, and Reporting.

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